Two ACU grads take top honors in writing contest

Bradshaw, Hadfield led literary journal

Two recent Abilene Christian University graduates won two of the top three prizes in the 2011 Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers' student writing competition.

Bethany Bradshaw, now a graduate student at North Carolina State University, won the poetry prize, while Tanner Hadfield, a graduate student at the University of Colorado, won for fiction writing.

The students, who both graduated in May, were honored for work they completed in ACU classes during the 2010-11 academic year. The organization's third student writing competition category is nonfiction.

In the poetry category the student is honored for a collection of up to five pages of poetry. Bradshaw's poems included "That Old Hayloft," "Hamster Wheel," and "You Asked Me What It Means."

Hadfield wrote his winning work, "Snowing in Darling," during instructor Heidi Nobles' fiction workshop last fall.

Al Haley, ACU associate professor of English and writer-in-residence, nominated the winning entries. In an English department blog, Haley said Bradshaw's and Hadfield's successes demonstrate how well ACU competes against larger universities with established master's of fine arts and master's programs in creative writing.

"Often their undergraduates have worked with the graduate faculty who are numerous, and many of whom are much-published writers themselves," Haley said. "So for a school like ACU to come along and win two out of three first places makes a kind of statement about the caliber of our classes, teachers and students."

Hadfield wrote back to ACU that he's taught his first class of undergrads as a graduate teaching assistant, and has several other irons in the fire. He is working on a novella, starting up an art-zine, judging a poetry contest for Subito Press and tutoring, Haley said.

Bradshaw wrote that she was enjoying the North Carolina weather, especially the rain dripping through the trees outside.

"For a long time now, the creative writing workshops have been one of the outstanding aspects of the English department at ACU," Haley said in a news release. Over the past decade, student stories, poems and essays written in workshops have won 11 firsts and 14 seconds in various contests, he said.